"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

"The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory." - Debord

What? Did we expect the advent of electronic trans-personal communication to leave us as it found us? Big events have big effects and so we are now in the throes of the most remarkable cultural transition since the invention of language.

Behold, fellow creatures, the sublimation of the individual and the coming of the Milum.

Quote:Behold, fellow creatures, the sublimation of the individual and the coming of the Milum.

Interesting you bring up the word "sublimation". Several months ago I struggled with a phrase seeking to understand how the sacred secular has been watered down and devalued. The example I am reminded of is the use of songs in commercials. What were once considered works of art, "sacred" in a sense, has been sampled out into a soundbyte that fits into a commercial to sell a product that, in essence, has nothing to do with the "meaning" in the songs and this in a product that is ultimately just stuff.

I was looking for a secular parallel to sacrilege. Desublimation was the word that was discovered.

While I will agree with you about the annoyance factor when art or classical music is downgraded to a background score for a commercial (Pachelbel's canon for coca cola); still, maybe there is someone who finds the tune so entrancing, that he searches for it and gets introduced thus to the original composer. It all comes around somehow in the larger scheme of things. And yes, our iconography seems to increasingly lack an aspirational value. Maybe that is because there is so little to aspire to in a globalised world with an information overload, where most things seem attainable.Democratisation of high culture, is one way of looking at it. Desublimation, another. The former seems somehow like a better thing and less angst ridden, wouldn't you say? :-)

"I was looking for a secular parallel to sacrilege. Desublimation was the word that was discovered." - aortomus

"Democratisation of high culture, is one way of looking at it. Desublimation, another" - Dharma

I don't know boys, you can "desublimate" if you want to, but I'm afraid that the cultural changes that we all see as a descent from a higher intellectual depth and acuity towards banal and shallower thinking is simply social evolution at it's best.

And lo! The train she runs, and like it or not, we are along for the ride.

The true origins of Baudrillard and Derrida: In Europe, in certain intellectual circles, talking like that gets you laid. The big words are just used to hide the absence of a substantial idea. In reality, they're verbal games. Intellectual jokes. To repudiate language with language is to repudiate your repudiation. To announce the death of meaning is to announce the death of the meaning of your announcement. And so on. It's all a zero-sum game. The only people actually seduced by it are callow students in the liberal arts who have intellectual pretentions and no life experience.

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